Business Needs Marketing

Sometimes being somewhat old and of a strong Swedish heritage which means stubborn in my family, I fail to truly listen to the good advice that I have received along the way as I have grown my business. Recently, I just began to take some of that advice to heart specific to my marketing plan by growing my speaking business.

At a speaking engagement that came from a referral, I concluded the presentation with a funny line, “If you know of anyone who needs a speaker, please let me know as I speak for food.” This simple request brought several chuckles along with five requests to speak at local service organizations.

After speaking at each of these 5 new opportunities, I once again concluded that “If you know of any other local organizations who would enjoy hearing me speak, remember I speak for food.” New requests came across my desk including a couple of paid engagements. I never realized that growing my business through marketing my speaking services could be as simple as just asking for it.

By not charging for local speaking engagements, I have been able to begin to market myself as well as my message that personal improvement or business improvement must come from within each individual. Using humor, an extensive work history, a self-directed learning attitude and a lot of personal experiences, I am able to speak from the heart and bring value to those in the audience.

Speaking engagements are a small business help strategy that may become a primary source of income or continue to be marketing vehicle that allows others to begin to know you as a:

Business speaker

Change management speaker

Educational speaker

Inspirational speaker

Motivational speaker

Paradigm speaker

Spiritual speaker

Whatever the reason or reasons that you are speaking, just remember this simple suggestion to secure more opportunities: Just ask and if possible, sprinkle a little humor and see your engagements quickly multiply along with your business results.

Business Podcast Marketing Case Study Shows How Podcasting Delivers Dramatic Results for Client. Podcasting has significant business marketing potential. If the business podcast strategy and online visibility plan is properly executed; podcasting has the potential to be a marketing tool that delivers great marketing results.

The professional business marketers over at marketingsherpa.com have just released a new case study titled “How to Use a Podcast to Promote a White Paper That Generates New Business Sales Leads”.
This case study is about how Bearing Point used podcasting to promote a white paper and saw sign up rates of over 30% versus a traditional 10%. This is a 200% increase over traditional marketing techniques.

Here is a short excerpt: “Dunay wasn’t sure if the podcasts would be a hit or not, especially as his key prospects tend to be fairly conservative. So he didn’t roll out trumpets and strobe lights for the launch.

Instead, the team posted the podcasts and announcements at several related sites including http://www.Podblaze.com, http://www.FreshPodcasts.com, and iTunes (all of which currently promote podcasts for free.) They also rolled out a press release and an email announcement to the house list. Their first podcast launched quietly July 29, 2005.

RESULTS

Joy and exultation! Hundreds of executives downloaded the podcasts. Dunay had hoped that 10% of podcast listeners would respond to the white paper download offer. Instead, 30% did…”

This is a great example of how marketing professionals should and could be using podcasting to help their business. This is the future of podcasting, Podcasting is going to become a marketing tool that communicates, educates and drives listeners to action. In this case the action was to download a white paper and effectively generate leads.

I have been trying to inform the business markets of this trend for the past 9 months. I discussed this very scenario in a Podcasting White Paper that was released a few months back. Read the full case study at http://www.MarketingSherpa.com

Experienced online marketing professionals that have expertise in the areas of podcast production, strategy, and visibility such as http://www.LeveragedPromotion.com can help your business achieve these same levels of results. Just creating a podcast in a vacuum of space is the wrong strategy. Make sure that you achieve maximum exposure for your podcasts so that they can deliver measurable marketing results.

Just like most traders, I started out trading Stocks, Futures and Commodities by way of the news, Government reports, crop reports, the occasional tip, and a gut feel. Needless to say, these were not very effective.

But then, during the late 1980′s, I became more aware of price charts and a few chart indicators.

The chart indicators got me excited, as I thought at the time that I had stumbled upon a way to know in advance what the market was going to do next. The Stochastic oscillator was really intriguing, and it almost appeared to predict when the market would move up or down.

But again, like most have discovered, these indicators don’t really predict. How can they, when they are simply based on averages, or volume, or a slew of other historical data backward monitoring divide by two forward projecting algorithm that has no more connection to the future than five dice in a shaker cup!

Now don’t get me wrong. Chart indicators are pretty useful and I continue to use them today (now 3 decades later). However, market forecasting is NOT what these indicators do best. They do, however, give us a lot of useful information that has its place even among those of us who rely mostly on market forecasting methods.

That’s right. I said “market forecasting methods”.

By the start of the 1990′s, I came upon the knowledge of applying Fibonacci ratios to market price action. The idea seemed a bit strange to me back then, until I decided to give it a try on my favorite Pork Bellies market. For the next 6 weeks, I would virtually catch every bottom or top within just a few ticks, turning a small amount of money into a larger small amount of money (I was using borrowed funds). Eureka!

But it soon became my undoing. Because of my initial long stretch of catching every new market move, often within just a couple of ticks of the very bottom or top, I started to think I could do no wrong. Wrong! I made a trade in the Live Cattle futures that I was so sure had to turn, but didn’t. I held onto the losing trade because it was impossible for me to be wrong. It wasn’t until I was wiped out that I had to admit that I’m human after all. My golden goose had become my golden ticket to bust-ville.

A lesson was learned back then that set me on a course to greater enlightenment. Market forecasting was in fact possible. However, market forecasting required incorporating discipline and confirmation, and that you can never be 100% accurate 100% of the time.

It also became quite apparent to me that the path to greater market forecasting would require digging deeper into the reasons why Fibonacci can be effective at times, and at other times not so much. This led me to realize that it all revolves around ‘natural laws’, that which Fibonacci is a part.

My search into the realm of natural laws brought me to the teachings of W. D. Gann. With Gann, I came to find value in the calculating of time and price squares (Gann Wheel also known as the Square of Nine), angles, ratios, market geometry, and much more.

Armed with Fibonacci and Gann and all the variations that comes with a deep understanding of these, my research pushed me out beyond the stars. Yes, the effect of the Sun and Moon, and a few of the neighboring planets on our planet Earth. It just made sense!

Now I’m not referring to Astrology. That is simply not my cup of tea. I’m a man of science, not mysticism or divination. What I am referring to is Astronomy, and the gravitational and seasonal effects that come with planetary motion and interactive influences.

So let me simplify this.

As the moon circles the Earth, it has an effect on bodies of water as well as the electromagnetic field of the Earth. We have tide charts as a result of this, and it has been proven humans tend to act differently (as a group) during full moons. The term ‘lunatic’ comes from the latin “Luna”, which is ‘moon’.

While the Earth turns once every 24 hours (giving us days), it revolves around the Sun once every 365 days approximately (a year). Since the Earth is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, it will move closer or farther away, resulting in what we see as ‘seasons’.

Now think about how these ‘seasons’ affect our markets and you’ll start to see the relationship.

Once I came to see the connection between the Fibonacci, the Gann, the geometric price patterns, the effects of the Moon and Sun, it all came together in what is known as CYCLES!

The 24-hour cycle (day), the 90-day cycle (season), the 365-day cycle (year), the moon cycle, and all kinds of other cycles happening at the same time but at varying degrees with different effects on different markets!

Market price action is affected by human behavior (we are the buyers/sellers), which is affected by supply and demand, which is affected by seasons, which is a cycle, and human behavior can be affected by the moon, which is also a cycle, and on and on.

With all this understanding about what affects the markets, and realizing that much of this can be exposed by way of a price chart and a few different approaches, market forecasting became even more effective than the simple Fibonacci model. That model only looked at the markets in a narrow way, thus effective at times and lacking at other times. True market forecasting requires having a grasp of several different techniques that address different aspects of price behavior.

It is when the avid chart reader goes forth to learn about these influences to price action that the proclamation of “market forecasting really works” becomes a forgone conclusion and part of the daily chart reading ritual.

“Our proven marketing system works on autopilot. Just sign up, and the world is your oyster.”

Yeah, I think the same guy that said that sold the Brooklyn Bridge to my brother-in-law.

So, here is the truth about the so-called “proven marketing systems,” and how you can employ a simple five step system to achieve blog marketing success–they all take time and effort to build, tweak, and maintain.

That said, there are marketing systems out there that can make you money, virtually on autopilot-and these proven marketing systems can help you build profitable blogs offering both affiliate marketing products, coaching, and network marketing opportunities.

So, what is the catch?

The catch is that you have to be willing to do the work to build your system.

It is like that peasant guy in the story, The Parable of the Pipeline, by Burke Hedges. There was no way he was ever going to make a dime hauling water to his village until he built the pipeline and made it work.

But when the water started flowing, he was “instantly” wealthy.

The same principles impacting the success of our peasant pipeline builder are at work in your blog marketing. Simply put, you have to build your system before you can expect them to come.

In this case, your proven marketing system consists of blog content that attracts organic search traffic based on your keyword focused articles. Once on your site, your readers will be exposed to valuable information relevant to your niche and their needs, as well as opportunities to join your email list.

So, if you are looking for a proven marketing system, and you’re tired of the garbage, the run around, and the outright hype, here are five steps you can follow:

1. Decide you want to build an online business

2. Choose a business model that suits you (network marketing, affiliate marketing)

Do not get distracted by all the fancy bells and whistles. And don’t lose sight of the key objective, which is to drive traffic to a lead capture page, and serve the needs of your subscribers with relevant information, advice, and product recommendations.

If you’re a B2B marketer, you possibly deal with one or more of such things once a day: search marketing, email marketing, social media, lead generation, and the list goes on. For some marketers, the day is spent juggling each of these one by one, the only relief coming is in the form of lunch or a fast washroom break. The days are long, yet it seems as time is constantly short.

If this sounds familiar, it may be time to think about a system that can do piles of the work for you. Several overwhelmed B2B marketers have begun turning to tools like marketing automation to take the manual work out of tiring marketing tasks like ROI reporting, lead qualification, and much more. Think you could benefit from marketing automation, as well?

1. Nurturing your leads:

If you are like most businesses. Most of your leads might not be sales-ready. You might have nurturing process, but if your leads are constantly falling over the cracks, this is a clear sign that you need marketing automation. Marketing automation software is an amazing way to push your non sales -ready leads to nurturing tracks and communicate with the continuously through perfectly- timed, automated messages.

2. Tension between you and your sales team:

Tension between your sales team and you is something that stays high all the time. It is because your sales team is unable to differentiate a good lead from a bad one. If you are going through this, then marketing automation is a good fit for you. It helps marketers to score leads accurately based on activity and demographics, so sales team won’t waste their time on chasing unqualified leads.

3. Your content is going outdated:

Do you have a bulk of content that you are not able to use effectively? Don’t panic, even we marketers who use marketing automation have issues with this. However, creating standard emails, automated programs, and landing pages that you can clone every single piece of content will certainly help. Creating and cloning your best marketing campaigns for each single channel will turn into your new favorite thing.

4. You take a “one size, fits all” approach:

You probably may not be able to increase your engagement level because you send the same tired message to everybody in your database. What’s your excuse on this? You don’t have to highlight and engage your prospects. Marketing automation integrates all of your marketing data including detailed prospect and client interactions/behaviors, so you can section the right message to every client.

5. Marketing Lacks Credibility:

This may be the biggest motivation to adopt marketing automation. Marketers must grab a seat at the table in any organization, however that is not always the situation. Marketing automation can position your team as a revenue generator, rather than an expense center – acquiring you the credibility and impact that you deserve.